The point is the Forsaken hasn't gotten a comeuppance suiting their atrocities. And this is while being easily down there with the Scourge. Not even the Orcs are like them.

And you wonder what I call Forsaken Mary Sues for?

There are two problems with this.

I'm saying it won't last and/or there will siginificant drawbacks to the Alliance's conquest that they won't get to use their new rewards to finally get the better of the Horde.

Like I said, drawbacks.

Again, it's not about no darkness. It's about making the Forsaken work as a player faction that can't be wiped out.

I feel this is the big point of contention. You seem to think they need to have a karmic payback... but is Warcraft a story where that is a thing? Now we can argue if Warcraft is a story where cosmic justice prevails or a more grey one where shit just happens but to me it seems quite clear Kyalin (and I) fall on the grey side and so we don't care if the Forsaken get their comeupance if the story is consistent and makes sense and hence the misunderstanding.

Note I am just pointing out what I think the major disagreement is, I don't want to go defending Blizzard's ability to write a believable story... mainly because I don't think they are capable of writing such a story.

It is inconsistent and makes no sense that the Alliance should not seek remunerations or revenge.

EDIT: The players also have a history of taking down the bad guys no matter what.

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As I've said I don't want to get bogged down in specifics or Blizz apologia... doubly so since I agree that the writing is shitty. As I said just pointing out the disconnect, some want an idealistic setting others want a more realistic one.

And while WoW is pretty black and white the older games did have villain protagonists galore and had them win big too.

It's not even that the Forsaken lack comeuppance for their behavior.

It's that their behavior has consistently failed to evoke a realistic response from their enemies or their allies. And that their activities fail to sync remotely with those of the Horde player, even if the player happens to be Forsaken as well. It creates the sense that the Horde would have welcomed Arthas with the Scourge and even Gul'dan with the Shadow Council into their ranks and let them both keep doing what they do as long as they claimed to be doing it "for the Horde."

It's just never really made sense for the player to help with the stuff they do in places like Silverpine and Hillsbrad, then suddenly transform into a noble and upright champion of Azeroth who's staunchly against such things on principle as soon as he/she sets foot outside of Forsaken territory, then reset back to gladly committing Scourge-tier atrocities whenever the occasional decaying psychopath from the Undercity shows up as a questgiver.

Some (definitely not all, but some) Horde players frantically defend them out of a sense that as a player of an undead character they are the Forsaken themselves, but frankly none of the Horde player characters are really them, undead included. Unless you PvP and do nothing else, the undead player's actions in-game just don't sync with the sentiments or behavior of their own race. Based on 99% of the Forsaken NPCs' interactions via quests and storylines, while the undead player is a hero of the Horde protecting its civilians and saving the day, the Forsaken as a race are largely complete monsters who'd just let such people die because they don't really give a shit about doing the right thing.

And the response from the rest of the Horde is to just blankly ignore it because the game mechanics prevent them from treating the Forsaken like they (and the Alliance) treat every other group in the game that behaves the way they do. Which will be worsened if post-BfA we see the Forsaken continuing that behavior in some plague-blighted stretch of Kalimdor and the rest of the Horde just shrugs and continues to ignore it. Because despite having what should be moderating presences like the Darkspears, tauren (plus Highmountain tauren now), blood elves (plus Nightborne now), druids and shamans (not counting Zandalari here because frankly even without Zul they're still a bunch of blood-sacrificing cannibals), the precedent has continued that said agencies don't actually do anything to temper the more damaging influences within the Horde, and they only really take action when things get completely out of control and nothing short of a civil war will ameliorate the problem.

Correct. They even did it with Gul'dan in the Second War.

The very same honorable guy who is praised by Thrall, even.

Theoretically you have the option to decline those quests. And that would even make sense, given that there is no single character who solved all the problems from Vanilla to Legion. Chronicle even leads you to conclude that when distributing success across dungeons.

I thought questlines like the Agamand one were a faithful portrait of the Forsaken identity.

Please don't mind the dreadlord

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@Cacofonix: I didn't realize you had posted. Sorry for the delay in my replies.

This being in regard to Sylvanas being able to drop plague regardless of whether she was commanding an empire or a rag tag group of mercenaries, two things are at issue.

First, despite this ability, she does lose some and is shown as having flaws. That's not consistent with being a mary sue.

Second, every character and country in the franchise right now has this problem - Sylvanas is in no way unique. Without putting too fine of a point on it, as far as Warcraft is concerned the suspension of disbelief is dead.


As to your point on the existence of drawbacks, I'm not really sure how that means that the Forsaken flatly never suffer reversals or get "comeuppance" for what they do. But I don't think this actually has all that much to do with Sylvanas as a character so much as it relates to the Alliance experience in general, namely, that the Alliance player is continually denied something that actually feels like a victory against the playable Horde.

But that discussion is beyond the scope of this topic. I'm happy to have it, but it doesn't relate to whether the Forsaken are "Mary Sues" or whether Sylvanas is a healthy character for the Horde and hence for the entire franchise to circle around.

@C9H20

Warcraft III and the initial iterations of World of Warcraft did get us closer to grey iterations of the world, especially once we moved away from the Burning Legion and started into Frozen Throne, Vanilla WoW, etc. I could gush about that, but Blizzard did it before, and the comparative numbers both between Warcraft 1/2 and 3 sales, and between Pre-Cata and Post-Wrath subscriptions can help to demonstrate what people prefer.

This partially gets into what ARM had said, but I think the overall issue with the Post-Wrath model was that the new generation of writers confused setting with story. The setting is critical in an MMO, but the model is really better suited for that setting containing a hundred small stories, and I do think we see Blizzard's best work, even to this day, when they have to talk about small conflicts and stories instead of these grand narratives that didn't need to be there.

You can see the boxes being checked. The "story" "needs" to be Star Wars. The bad guy needs to be threatening, the heroes need to be at their lowest point with the Empire about to win, then they need to pull together and triumph in the end.

Oh, but, they can't actually win, because the "bad guy" is actually a playable faction, and because it's an MMO, they still need motivation to play. You can't have realistic geopolitical reactions coming from say, a faction of druids reacting to half of their members' homes being invaded, clear cut, corrupted, and burnt down, because that would impair the "bad guy" faction's experience - and that's a legitimate concern as we're seeing play out in the wake of Sylvanas in Stormsong. So you can either disregard it and go whole hog, and you remove the bad guy's motivation to play. Or, you can make the ending unsatisfying for the good guy faction, and have neutral parties ignore the bad guy faction's villainy.

This is like trying to drive a cruise ship as though it were a powerboat. Sure, YOU think it's exciting and fun, but that's not of much consolation to the couple in suite 3a that just got crushed by a dresser against a wall during one of your power turns.

This isn't a problem with the faction war, per se. It's a problem with the faction war needing to be "the story", instead of "the setting".

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Not even the Alliance. Tirion Foldring with his posse were right there in the East and surely could have (with Alliance support, maybe) countered the Forsaken. But instead they just sat there playing cards while the Forsaken went on the march. Hell, I wonder if it's a coincidence that Tirion was killed off in the same expansion that had Sylvanas rise to Warchief (that is, even the developers finally realized how odd it'd be for Tirion to do so little against Sylvanas so they killed him off to avoid confronting that question).

Let's review:

Orcs and Humans to Beyond the Dark Portal: The Old Horde conquers Stormwind in OaH but is beaten and ends up in internment camps with Gul'dan ending up demon feed while Doomhammer is captured in ToD. Ner'zhul's Horde ends up getting their planet blown up then Ner'zhul gets painfully turned into the Lich King in BtDP. All in all the Alliance comes out on top and in better shape than the Orcs with Allies.

Reign of Chaos to Frozen Throne: Arthas joins the Scourge and massacres his kingdom then proceeds to rampage around the East but this was done to set up the Burning Legion's return. The BL are beaten. Illidan and his posse try to kill the Lich King but they're villainous. Garithos gets killed by Varimathas but he was a villain. Arthas stops Illidan but at the time this was written he was supposed to have been not really Arthas anymore (see official statements that the Lich King post-TFT is a composite entity and not just Corrupted Arthas) so really only Ner'zhul wins here from the villains if anybody.

I see a lot of suitable comeuppances.

Not to burst down your bubble there kiddo, but correlation does not imply causation, so unless you have a direct proof that the switch from a more grounded and amoral setting of Warcraft I/II to a more idealistic and heroic setting of Warcraft III was behind the increase of sales, this is nothing but a wild conjecture. Or are you trying to tell me that Diablo III's thrice as large sales compared to Diablo II happened due to the change of the atmosphere and thematics, even though this change has been until this day one of the largest points of criticism?

"Can help to demonstrate" =/= "proves".

That said, it doesn't make sense to completely ignore a correlation either, especially when you lack the sort of expensive, resource intensive study that would be required to parse out the full suite of factors and their effects.

Edit: I also brought up the other variance in sales (the post wrath decline) for a reason. We are not talking about the increase observed between WC I/II and III in isolation, as your post seems to do.

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You can't use a conjecture that has not hard evidence supporting it to demonstrate anything really. Well, you can, but do not expect a positive reception.

There's a world of difference between taking a look at a correlation and using it to form a conjecture that serves the very basis of an argument.

Hmm, except Cataclysm, despite being marketed as a switch towards less heroic stories focusing on geopolitics and fight for natural resources in a broken world, had far better box sales that Wrath of the Lich King. And even looking at this very forum, people were looking forward to these themes, the reason of their later criticism was the execution, a seeming inequality between the factions, and the hordes of shallow pop cultural references that rendered the whole thing a caricature of what it was marketed as.

The first parts of your post just seem to be more objections to forming and presenting theories based on correlations in the absence of other information. I don't think they add anything that we haven't already discussed.

On your point regarding Cataclysm box sales however, I would be cautious about using box sales as your metric when subscription data is available. Subscription data tells us more about how the audience reacts to and continues to want to pay for content, and dampens the effects that marketing and brand equity would have on pure box sales.

(Edit: I can buy some of the reasons you put down for the subscription drop, but they don't explain the continued decline in through MoP, where a lot of those issues were... I wouldn't say corrected, but addressed.)

That's one of the reasons I don't like using Warcraft III by itself as an example. Substantial portions of those sales come from Warcraft II fans, and that's before we consider that if the game flopped, the sales numbers probably still would have been higher - not necessarily true for the next title if it flopped. But we also know that it didn't flop, and we know how successful that next title, which counts Warcraft III's direction heavily in it's foundation, turned out.

If you're looking for a counterexample, I'd sooner bring up WoD. That did see a spike in sales (and for a bit: subscriptions) explicitly catered to the Warcraft I and II crowd, and then declined after that marketing effect met the realities of a product that wasn't really given a fair chance.

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You seem to forget that Ogrim would later regret his choices and put his faith in Thrall, expecting him to lead a "better" Horde that would not repeat the mistakes of its past.

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So you wish to join the unofficial SoL Discord? Say no more!

Only because his choices ended up biting him on the ass

"Thrall, listen. They can beat us. Be honorable rivals with them"

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What you say doesn't match what we've been told about his character and his motives. Even the latest lore source, Vol. 3, states that he wanted the orcs to return to their shamanistic roots.

Allowing Gul'dan, the Burning Blade cult or the Forsaken (after they've given up all pretences) to operate from within the Horde goes against what he and Thrall were hoping to achieve.

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So you wish to join the unofficial SoL Discord? Say no more!

Horde is fucking cancer.

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So Chronicles 3 stealthily tried to whitewash Sylvanas:

http://www.wowhead.com/news=283096/l...nicle-volume-3

Yeah, just ignore that talk about arrows in her quiver.

Please don't mind the dreadlord.

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You really ought to do about your use of fallacies. First, there is this straw man. You know, I've never made any objection to forming theories based on correlations, I've made objections to using such theories as the basis of an argument.

Why? Well, simply put, because hoc ergo propter hoc is considered a logical fallacy for a reason.

The way I see it, box sales are more tied to the overrarching theme and marketing, whereas subscription data seem to be tied more to the actual quality/execution of the content in question and its subsequent longetivity.

That's why Mists had lower initial box sales than Cataclysm or Draenor, the theme of the expansion simply not being as appealing, yet the subscription was a bit more stable, at least until the post Orgrimmar content drought and minus the initial drop.

In context to what I said in the first place, this is a distinction without a difference. If that confuses you, it may be due to confusion between an argument and a statement of fact. In some situations an argument is a statement of fact, in other cases it may be used to express an opinion, a theory, an interpretation, or even conjecture.

So once again: "can help to demonstrate" =/= "proves".

I think that's fair. The only element I would add is that box sales are also influenced by brand and franchise equity.

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I am sorry Kyalin, but it simply does not work this way. An argument does not have to be a statement of fact indeed, but even then, it needs to be grounded in something solid, otherwise it oughts to be dismissed.

So the discussion you and I just had about box sales versus subscription revenues is solid and acceptable, but claiming that the increase in box sales from War I/II to III taken with the post wrath decline may help to demonstrate what sorts of stories players prefer ought to be entirely dismissed? There is no more basis to the first discussion than there is to the second.

I could disrupt the conclusion that I agreed with on subscription sales by bringing up macroeconomic trends, market saturation, fatigue with the style of game, or stronger competition (not in the exact same space, but in video games in general) as conflating factors. These didn't occur to you, or if they did you didn't mention them, but they do pose a third factor threat to the correlation you and I were talking about.

I think that may be because you were sympathetic to the claim on subscription revenues versus box sales, but you didn't like the conclusions buried in my observation of sales trends between War 1/2 and 3 as well as the post wrath decline. As for me, I'm not holding out for someone to amass the research necessary to parse out all of these conflating factors to make purposely tentative comments on what the trends appear to say, or to consider the far less well signposted tentative commentary from others. I may not agree with that latter commentary, and I can acknowledge intractable problems with logical basis, but I will consider it, and as we've observed, at times, so will you.

That's also reasonable. We don't have the resources or access to data as contributors to a fan site necessary to provide reasonable assurance for most of our claims, and we probably never will.

So, if you don't like what those tentative comments have to say, fine. But you should be aware that you aren't being consistent in which correlative arguments you will consider, and which you will simply dismiss.

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Come on

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Both claims are completely acceptable by themselves. Both are pretty much equal in their theoretically value. The third one you mention would be superior to them given its nature. That's not the issue at all. The issue is how you are using your claim. If you can't somehow understand that, I feel we are done here.

But are her claims even relevant to the subject at hand?

Or is she saying "Sylvanas sells, thus necessary evil" and doing an extra effort on not being clear at that?

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